Look up ‘retail enforcement pilot’ in google. Put simply, the idea is that local authority inspectors go around businesses with handheld computers asking lots (and at last count I think it was over 100) tick-box questions about regulation. The idea is to reduce the number of regulators visiting businesses, by, for example, getting an Environmental Health Officer to go around ticking boxes for Trading Standards and the Fire Service.

All the data from the box ticking is supposed to then be processed, perhaps triggering other regulatory events, depending of course on which boxes the regulator ticked upon the visit.

The politicans think it is a good idea, the civil servants think it is a good idea and so do the CBI! Personally I think it is a really stupid idea, but it seems to be one of these ‘consensus’ things we were blogging about the other day regarding Afghanistan.

You quite reasonably asked ‘who regulates the regulators’?

Good question adam, and I answer you as a regulator, we are regulated by people with little experience of the real world who seem to make a good living for themselves talking in soundbites and writing in jargon.

2) No wealth – no licence.

3) Ratings company should provide insurance for instruments they do ratings for. As a minimum 5% of the whole investment should be enough for them to avoid costly mistakes (for investors).

This is very closely tied to the world of accountancy. the fiasco of Enron was due to people finding creating ways to keep items off the balance sheet. The creativity circumvented thespecific rules that were in place. In the UK (and Europe), Enron would have broken the general principles about subsiduaries.
The advantage of general principles is that they can allow for situations yet unkown. In the complex world of finance, this can increase the effective control, whilst reducing the complexity and compliance. It enables the regulator stay ahead of the game, whilst reducing the burden on businesses.

I was on a course a few years back on accountancy rules. The tutor gave an illustrative example that helps illuminate the idea.
Imagine having a teenage daughter going for a night out. You could give her a long list of rules about what not to do. Alternatively you could say “You should do nothing that you would not be prepared to tell your parents about the next day”

Currently, there are more European “MiFid” directives than the all the laws enshrined within the entire British legal system, both statutory and common, since 1066 when we were first invaded by the first set of Europeans !

I note these MiFid directives prevent direct marketing of financial products, stop jobs, create costs and paperwork to businesses, along with transfers of much of their operations to places like India.

So the FSA and its lunatic compulsive bureaucratic controls, which is akin to England being under occupation by aliens, has to be dismantled and people who KNOW what they are doing put back to where they are in order to restore sanity, more profit for business, more jobs, less cumbersome and understandable protection for consumers and avoid the dictatorship of MiFid directives from well meaning bureaucrats which don’t have the first foggiest idea of what they are doing when it comes to running a business, policing or advising face to face customers in their homes who can’t grasp the mentality of bureaucrats but would rather have plain old common or garden, good honest ‘advice’ from someone who understands they are real people and not people to put in ‘tick boxes’.

The result is, as you say, box-ticking regulation that causes more inconvenience to ordinary people than to criminals.

(Identity cards will just move the problem around. Instead of the bank being shown fake documents, they will be shown to the passport office. The passport office has the same problem as the bank: a few fraudsters hidden among millions of honest people.)

who regulates the regulators

Hear, hear!